What would the house be without mamma? the little girl asked herself, and the great blobs of hot dew in her eyes fell upon her cold fingers. “Aren’t you well, Miss Loo?” asked the old groom who drove her, and Loo made him a very sharp answer in the irritation of her troubled little heart. She ran into the light and comfort of the house with a perverse, childish misery which she did not understand. She would not let old William take her cloak from her, but threw it down, and stumbled over it, and stamped her little foot, and could have cried. Poor little Loo! she was sick at heart, and did not know what it meant. Instead of going to her mother, as she usually did, she hastened up to the nursery where “all of them” were in a highly riotous condition at the moment, and where the darkness of her little face was unnoted by all but nurse, who took off her boots and warmed her feet, and did away with the only physical reason Loo dared to pretend to as an excuse for looking wretched. It was not very easy to look wretched in that room. By the side of the fire where a great log blazed was Harry, aged ten, with a great book clasped in his arms, and his cheeks and hair equally scorched and crimsoned with near vicinity to the flame. Little Mary, and Alf, the baby, were playing at the other end of the room. Alf was six, though he was the baby; but Mrs Clifford was the kind of woman to love a pet, and the little fellow’s indignant manhood was still smothered in long curls and lace tuckers. He avenged himself by exercising the most odious tyranny over his next little sister, who was Baby’s slave. All this little company Loo looked round upon with mysterious looks. She herself was twelve, little and pale, with nothing particular about her but her eyes, and her temper, which had already made itself, unfortunately, felt through the house. She sat maturing her plans till she heard the clock strike, and saw that it would shortly be time to go to her mother in her dressing-room, as the Fontanel children always did before dinner. She immediately bestirred herself to her task. “Nurse,” said Loo, “will you take these things down to mamma’s dressing-room, please, and tell her we will all come presently; and if you wish to go down-stairs, you may. I will take care of the children, and take them down to mamma.” “Thank you, Miss Loo; but there’s nobody to be at dinner but Mr Summerhayes and Mademoiselle, and you’re all to go down,” said Nurse; “you’re too little to have the charge of Master Alf, and you’ve all got to be dressed, dears, for dessert.” “Then you can come up when I ring. I want the children by themselves,” said little Loo, with her imperious air. “You can go away.”